Friday, February 24, 2017

Susan Casper passed away in her sleep this morning, after a several years' illness. Marianne and I, along with Chip Delany, visited her yesterday. She was exhausted, in pain, and terribly, terribly weak. But as acute as ever. She died with her wits intact.

Surviving her is her husband and, before that, lover for forty-seven years, Gardner Dozois and her son Christopher Casper, his wife Nicole and her grandchildren Tyler and Isabella.

Susan was a dear friend for over forty years. Marianne and I are both desolated by her death. But here's the thing: I couldn't swear to you that we're the unhappiest of her friends at this moment -- not even that we're the unhappiest of her Philadelphia friends. She had a lot of people who cared a great deal about her. Now we are all one in our grief.

I'll be writing more eventually. But right now, the loss is too fresh. So I'm giving myself a temporary pass.

For the moment, I'll just say this: Susan had a great many friends. Her death has made us all miserable. That in itself is a tribute to her.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

The institution doesn't really have a name. Sometimes it's called The Writers' Brunch, sometimes The SF Brunch, and other variants. My attempts to rename it Purdom's Raiders met with widespread lack of enthusiasm.

At any rate, after a hiatus of quite some time, the roughly-bimonthly brunch has been resurrected. We ate, we talked, we sat around. Mostly, we talked.

Above: A picture I call Men in Black. From left to right: Lawrence Schoen, Chris Urie, and Samuel R. Delany.
Below: Fran Wilde, Samuel R. Delany, and Your Humble Correspondent in a completely unposed photograph. Would I lie to you?

And as always . . .
As of tomorrow morning, I'm on the road again. This time I'm headed for Boston and Boskone, that great city's illustrious science fiction convention.

If you're going to be in attendance, why not say hello?

Above: Top photo is copyright 2017 and used by the kind permission of Fran Wilde. Bottom photo is copyright 2017 and used by the even more kind permission of the the M. C. Porter Endowment for the Arts.

Monday, February 13, 2017

If you're one of the old hands of science fiction, the word of Ed Bryant's passing comes as very sad news. Many younger writers and readers, alas, will have only the vaguest notion of who he was.

Back when I was trying to break into the field, Ed was part of a generation that included Joe Haledeman, Gardner Dozois, and George R. R. Martin, plus a few others, who were shaking up the field, making things happen, writing the best and most interesting stories around. They -- Bryant most emphatically included -- were dazzling.

Everybody will mention Ed's two Nebula Awards and multiple Hugo nominations simply because that's the easiest way to establish the esteem in which he was held. The important thing to keep in mind is that he wrote stories that deserved those honors.

Ed remained an active part of the SF community to his dying day, but as time went by his fiction became rarer and tended to appear in horror venues, which made him less visible. He also had serious health issues over the years and that cut into his productivity.

The Locus Online notice of his death mentions that he was a critic. Yeah, I guess. What I remember from those days, however, is that he was one of the people who were actively encouraging new writers, critiquing manuscripts, offering advice -- performing the secret ministry of our genre, without compensation. Just to encourage the creation of the the literature he loved.

He was also one hell of a nice guy. I won't tell the story of how, at one convention, he wound up stark naked pushing a bed down a hotel corridor at three in the morning, except to say that it came about because he was an honest man with a good heart.

Also a helluva good writer.

Vaya con dios, Ed. Your friends miss you already.

Above: There we are, Ed and me, at MidAmeriCon II, plotting the overthrow of all that is good and decent in science fiction. You're welcome.

Friday, February 10, 2017

Those who know me are aware that I take a special pleasure in my association with Science Fiction World. I like and respect the people there and, based entirely on the titles of other translated stories that have appeared there, they seem to have very good taste in science fiction.

Yesterday, a package arrived in the mail with my contributor's copies of the December 2016 issue of Science Fiction World Translations. (I think this is a spin-off magazine, but it might be a regularly-scheduled special issue. Maybe somebody who can read Chinese can set me straight?)

The issue contains not one! not two! not three! but four stories by me. They are:

"Radio Waves"
"The Edge of the World"
"The Changeling's Tale"
"Mother Grasshopper"

These are all stories that I am particularly proud of and, taken as a group, they form a very nice mini-collection of my work. So my day is made, I am happy, and I have something to brag about at the Pen & Pencil Club tonight.

And while I'm being happy . . .

There's also an author photo of me in SFW showing me pointing to the Chinese translation of Bones of the Earth. I'm particularly pleased with that because it was taken in the Science Fiction World offices in Chengdu. I've visited those offices twice, on widely separate occasions. That's another thing that makes me extremely happy.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

I have fallen behind on this blog more than ever before. Mea culpa. I have been so deeply involved writing The Iron Dragon's Mother that I simply have not had the mental energy to post here. I'll try -- honest! -- to do better.

Meanwhile, just to give you an idea of how the novel is going, here's the list I'm keeping of proper nouns, odd words, and non-standard usages in the text. There are a couple of spoilers hidden in it, but it would take a sharp eye to spot them. And it's subject to change. I doubt Samgrass will retain his name into the final version, though I may give it to somebody else.

To give you some idea of how it's going, you can view a previous version of this list which I posted last September here.

Zmeya-Gorynchna, of
the line of Zmeya-Goryschena, of the line of Gorgon, Zmeya-Gorynchna, 1108, the
Worm Above: There's my desk with the typescript of a much earlier chapter and, atop it, the cloth-covered second dedicated notebook for the novel and my current carrying-around notebook, open to a significant page.